“I foresee some great and terrible changes in the voting rights arena,” said Sen. Hank Sanders, D-Selma. “It will not be long in my opinion before the right to vote will be snatched away with a thousand little cuts and some big cuts.”

Sanders said an example is an Alabama law requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls. The law passed in 2011 but had not been submitted for the required pre-clearance by the Justice Department before Tuesday’s ruling. With that ruling effectively ending the need for pre-clearance, at least for now, state officials said they expect the law to be in place for the 2014 elections.

Sanders noted that many people contend it’s no big deal to have to show a photo ID to vote.

“A whole lot of people think, ‘So what about photo ID? We have to have them when we go to the bank or we ride airplanes.’ But we’re talking about a constitutional right, and you ought not to have to produce a photo ID to exercise a constitutional right,” Sanders said.

Sanders and state Rep. Alvin Holmes, D-Montgomery, said many older voters who don't drive don't have photo IDs.

Sanders, one of the organizers of a caravan that made stops in Alabama and other states earlier this month in support of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, said the 1901 Alabama Constitution did not say that blacks could not vote, but that poll taxes, literacy tests and other impediments to voter registration had that effect anyway.

“One thing I can say about legislators is that in Alabama and other states, they’re very creative, they can find all kinds of ways to take away the right to vote,” Sanders said. “I can’t even foresee all of the ways. But I do foresee that everything possible will be done to limit the right to vote for minorities, to suppress the right to vote for minorities, to deny the right to vote for minorities.”

Rep. Alvin Holmes, D-Montgomery

Holmes said he expected to see tactics not identical, but similar in intent to the ones of the Jim Crow era.

“In various counties in the state of Alabama when you go and register to vote they’re going to have new long, complicated forms for you to fill out,” Holmes said. “It won’t be exactly like it used to be. But we still have many of our people who can’t read and write real good and that’s a form of intimidation. If they know they have to go through that, they won’t even go to the registrar’s office to become registered voters.”

Jeffery Jones of Mobile joined Sanders for a State House news conference on Tuesday. Both are involved in the National Coalition of Leaders to Save Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

“We’re going to be watching very closely any activity to assure that we don’t see voter rights violations,” Jones said.

Sanders said, “We have to organize and we have to mobilize and we have to do everything we can.”